Talk of Our Towns

Dear Hometown Pasadena reader: I have some news, which I’m sorry to share as Hometown Pasadena readers and subscribers have been so supportive of this online magazine. I am taking a hiatus. For about five weeks (more or less). My 82-year-old mother has been fighting breast cancer, though it’s toward the end of treatment. Thankfully, she’s doing […]

What started as a career as a travel and documentary photographer evolved into large scale installation-making, blending painting, drawing, and sculpture—and with the elements of light remaining as the primary and key instrument. Christophe Piallat was born in Queens, New York in 1970 and followed his artistic desires—camera in hand—while in his early 20s. He […]

Just these titles make it worth taking a deeper look… Fifty Shades of Pianissimo Salsa Is Not Necessarily Sex Music @ Boston Court presents its Summer Main Stage Series with Piano Spheres’ Vicki Ray, a musical theater extravaganza, “an ear-bending evening including Stockhausen’s magnum opus Kontakte,” and a Bolivian chanteuse. The series opens Friday, July […]

A few weeks ago, our earthly oven rose to 106 degrees. To put it mildly, it was ghastly. By midday, if one was not in an air-conditioned setting, it was difficult to put words together and actually make comprehensible sentences. In other words, our brain was mush. Then our dear parents came to town for Hometown Pasadena’s teenage […]

Nancy Evans Dance Theatre: This is the dance that makes you think, makes you stop and wonder about what you value and how you want to be in the world. Evans’ musicianship (as seen in others pieces as well) is embedded in her craft. Music, dance and expression all as one. —Beth Megill, dance instructor/choreographer, […]

For the past nine years, Chalk Repertory Theatre has been creating some pretty unusual theater in the Los Angeles area. On Saturday night, I witnessed their latest production, In Case of Emergency. The play takes place in the garage of a young lady tormented by fears of disaster, so the venue for the play was, […]

Artes Vocales comes to the beautiful and acoustically superior sanctuary at First United Methodist Church, performing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on June 4. This story of Jesus’ suffering and death as told in the Gospel of St. Matthew had its premier in Leipzig on Good Friday in 1727. The Kapellmeister’s Magnum Opus in terms of length, […]

It’s the 5th LitFest Pasadena on June 4 with award-winning authors, panel discussions, Q&A, readings, prizes, and micro-narratives. And, it’s all free. The day begins at 10 a.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore then meanders around the Playhouse District to Zona Rosa Alley and the Playhouse’s Carrie Hamilton Theater. Jonathan Gold speaks and takes questions in regard […]

Regarding the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Wendy Wasserstein’s last play Third, which was written shortly before her death in 2005, Mark Favermann at Berkshire Fine Arts writes, “It is among her wittiest, wisest, and perhaps most personal play.” Favermann continues… Set at an unnamed, elite, New England liberal arts college, this play’s central character, Professor Laurie Jameson, […]

Since 2011, “a collective of Asian American creative professionals” have been telling ‘the stories of communities underrepresented in theatre.” Artists at Play debut on the local theater scene was its production and the L. A. premiere of Lauren Yee’s “cheekily subversive comedy” Ching Chong Chinaman, which was followed in 2012 by Edith Can Shoot Things and […]